A variety of literature describes how individuals make the transition from student to
professional educator. Most teacher educators expect the transition to be a rather lengthy
process incorporating several years of training and practice. One theory suggests a
five-step process for the development of expertise in any area (Trotter, 1986). These
stages are: 1) Novice, 2) Advanced Beginner, 3) Competence, 4) Proficient, and 5) Expert.

It generally takes 10 to 15 years to move from novice to expert. It just takes that
much time and experience to accumulate the necessary knowledge and skills. As a candidate
moves through the undergraduate program, he or she will generally move through the first
two levels and start work on the third. It generally takes several years of experience to
become fully developed in the competence stage. Finally, only a very few teachers, even
those with decades of experience ever move into the proficient and expertise levels. The
following narrative provides an overview of the knowledge and skills developed at each
level.

Novice Stage

The first stage of attaining mastery is the novice stage. At this point the
individual's task is to learn to recognize specific objective facts along with
fundamental concepts and specific rules of action. Prospective teachers are
supposed to get an overview about what it is to be a professional educator. They begin
developing some initial skills, acquiring an initial vocabulary, and obtaining some
initial ideas about what teaching is all about. Their initial understandings are still
incomplete at the end of this stage. It is not intended that they will have a clear vision
of the profession by the end of this stage and are not supposed to have the complex skills
to take charge of the classroom by that time. However, it is expected that students will
begin to develop a cognitive map or one piece of a cognitive map about what it means to be
a professional educators.

At VSU, there are at least seven courses that are used to provide an
introduction to the field of education:

The second stage in the process is the advanced beginner stage. At the advanced
beginner stage preservice teachers are adding to their knowledge of facts, they
are recognizing previously undefined facts, obtaining more information relative to the
teaching-learning process, increasing their knowledge of relevant vocabulary, concepts,
and principles. As they go into the advanced beginner stage, they begin to
understand that what they have been taught to that point is a good first approximation of
a very complex set of understandings necessary to function as a professional educator.

This stage continues your development in your undergraduate program and involves
300- and 400-level courses in your major. Your undergraduate training ends with a student
teaching experience. However, moving through the advanced
beginner stage requires more than simply completing college courses. In order to
successfully move into the next stage, that of competence, a considerable amount of
classroom experience is required. That is, one does not normally become a competent
professional without a significant amount of hands-on teaching-learning experiences. One
does not become a professional educator by taking college classes alone; there must be
engagement in the teaching-learning process. For this reason VSU teacher education
programs provide students with a variety of field experiences throughout the training
period. This is a critical component of becoming a professional educator.

Competence

The third stage is competence, the point at which an
individual is capable becomes qualified in their desired area. For teachers, this
generally means completing a Bachelor's degree in education and meeting initial
certification requirements. Competence is really the minimum that level that individuals
should obtain in order to act as a professional educator. At this stage the individual is beginning
to recognize more context-free principles and concepts as well as situational elements.
In other words, the teacher has some understanding of concepts and principles that hold
for most learners in a variety of situations and other principles and concepts that apply
only in specific situations. Towards the latter part of this stage, the individual begins
to acquire the ability to problem solve. That is, the individual begins to say "I
tried this, but the results are not what I wanted. What do I do now?" This is very
different from the procedure-following approach that might be expected from someone in the
advanced beginner stage.

This stage begins as you accept full-time employment as a professional educator. It
generally takes 2-5 years of one-the-job training (and, in my opinion, a master's degree)
for a person to become a competent professional educator. Many teachers never achieve this
level because they don't gain enough experience. The figure below shows that 50% of women
and 70% of men leave the profession before they gain five years of experience.

More
recent data suggest that retention is better for individuals who complete a
master's degree and worse for individuals who complete an alternative
certification program.

AVERAGE
RETENTION RATES FOR

DIFFERENT PATHWAYS INTO TEACHING

%
completed program%
entered teaching% remaining after
3 years

1 Five-year program (B.A. in subject field and M.A.
in education)
2 Four-year program (B.A. in subject field or in education)
3 Short-term
alternativecertification
program (B.A. and summer training)

The next two stages in the development of mastery are proficiency and expertise. These
individuals are generally recognized as being among the best in their chosen fields.

Only
a small percentage of professional educators ever reach this stage. These are the teachers
one normally thinks about when we remember the teachers who had the most influence on us.

In the stage of proficiency an individual can identify the important elements
of the task very quickly, very easily. They have a fluid style that allows them to
implement decisions based on intuitive understandings--understandings that come out of
their experiences. These understandings are so internalized that sometimes they
can not even state why it is that they are thinking that way.

This is the stage
that an individual's style begins to be expressed and the person's experience (rather than
school training) begins to be a major factor in performance. Most people at this stage
have acquired a mentor who can guide them beyond the general education available through
coursework.

At the expertise level--and these are really the stars of the field--the individual is operating
in an experienced-based similar to that achieved at the proficient stage, but in a more
holistic manner. This means that they are not focusing on simply one or two
elements, but are able to comprehend and work with a variety of patterns. For most
individuals in a field, those operating in the stage of competence, if they try to focus
on more than one or two variables at a time, they get cognitive overload and cannot handle
it. People who are operating at the stage of expertise can handle a large quantity of
information and give a very fluid, natural performance. The major difference between
individuals in the stages of proficient and expertise is that what individuals in the
latter stage do almost always works. Individuals in the stage of proficient still make
mistakes; those in expertise provide almost perfect performance.

We feel very fortunate when we have the privelage of engaging one of these teachers. We
may only interact with a handful in our entire education experience. These educators are
widely recognized as superior. They are also likely to be mentors for educators who desire
to become like them.